Morphological Expression and Ordering in Korean and Japanese

This paper is concerned with three areas of Korean and Japanese morpho-syntax in which an account based on Optimality Theory seems to provide certain advantages of explanation and simplicity over previous accounts. The areas discussed are : the interaction of the copula and genitive marker with structural case markers and other 'final' nominal suffixes, such as the topic marker; the Japanese prenominal morpheme -no, in its alternations with -na and ø; and the competition between words and small syntactic constructions, such as those involving adjectival nouns. The general approach here leads to a view of the notion of 'economy of expression' which is directly linked to the morphological forms of the language, as opposed to some larger and perhaps less clearly motivated syntactic constructs

Sub-Phrasal Syntax in Korean

While much recent work in syntax has concentrated on the scrambling possibilities of non-head elements in the Korean clause, in this paper I investigate the syntax of certain non-head elements which cannot scramble, such as negative adverbials like an and mos, adverbials like cal 'well' and cokum ('a little'), and bare verbal nouns (as in tochak ha-ta 'arrive'). I argue that within the productive phrasal syntax of Korean there is a 'subphrasal' component, which accounts for the combination of the restricted elements discussed here. Each such element has the property that it does not project beyond the XO level; nevertheless, all of this is syntax, and falls outside the domain of the lexicon